Marty's typepad

Pingz - Super simple network connection internet availability monitor plasmoid thing

I am on a train right now that provides free wi-fi. But you know how these networks work - one second you're chatting with your friend, next second you lose connection. Getting mad enough about not knowing if I have internet or not, I wrote a super simple Plasma applet to monitor the network connection. This is a bit different from the network manager icon, which shows you that you are connected to the wi-fi, but that does not mean the wi-fi router has access to the internet. So this monitors the internet availability directly by sending ping packets to kde.org google.com, one every 5 seconds. If the ping gets back, it shows green icon (user-online icon), if not, it turns into gray (user-offline) icon. Simple as that.

The code is at kde:scratch/mklapetek/pingz, feel free to improve it if you feel like, it's good enough for me for now :)

Update: One thing I didn't realized when running in plasmoidviewer is, that QProcess::execute(..) waits for the ping process to finish. This has the effect of completely hanging plasma every 5 seconds when added to panel or desktop. Fix will follow shortly (if I'll have internet).

Update2: Fixed.

Kubuntu, MacBook EFI and Nvidia

So I was installing the newest release of Kubuntu even before it was officially announced and hit a hard wall with it. Took me about four days to figure it out and fix it properly, so here I'm sharing it, hoping someone will find it useful when in similar troubles.

tl;dr version at the end. Somehow it turned into a full fledged story.. :D

A bit of background first. On my MacBook Pro 7,1 (mid-2011) I first installed Kubuntu 11.04. As was the custom/ritual for the past few years, with every new release of the distro I was using (starting with Fedora 5) I went to the shop, bought a CD and burned the iso. Same for Kubuntu 11.04, nothing special, everything worked. Then they decided to raise the size and not fit on the CDs anymore, so I went just with simple distro upgrade to 11.10, no clean install. Same thing with 12.04. However my root partition became a real mess with lots of devel stuff, lots of deprecated packages and libraries and whatnot. And I was constantly running out of space on that partition. So I decided to just format that partition and install the newest Kubuntu 12.10 as soon as it's out (silly me).

But since the iso no longer fits the CD, I went for installing from USB. After some initial troubles with the installer (which were partially due to bad partitioning, partially because of the installer not handling Mac's EFI properly), I managed to install it, screwing up Mac's bootloader in the process. But I didn't need it anyway, I was happy with grub and my new Linux install.

Kubuntu comes with this nice tool called "jockey", which allows you to install proprietary drivers just by clicking one button. So I went for proprietary Nvidia drivers as I play games from time to time and I use the notebook in uni quite a lot, so I need good battery life. Drivers activated, rebooting and black screen. So I did the usual - check if nouveau is blacklisted, if nvidia kmod is properly loaded, see the logs....and nothing. Everything was perfectly fine. Except the black screen. So I used jockey to switch the Nvidia driver off, rebooted and no X at all. Well since it was clean install and the install was quite fast, I just reinstalled the whole system. And same scenario happened - activated different Nvidia driver, rebooted, black. Reinstall. Tried driver from nvidia.com, no luck. Tried drivers from xorg-edgers ppa, no dice. Downgrading X server, pffft. All the same issue.

At this point I started to become desperate that I can't figure out what's wrong, Google was no help and I was without usable system for two days. Now if you're thinking - "why didn't you just stay with nouveau?" well I did. For one day, when I hit some (known, reported) bug while watching movie, sending my X to /dev/null and locking up kernel. I was starting to think that my graphics card is dieing...

Hours and hours of Googling later I found out that my system was booted using EFI mode. Investigating this deeper I discovered, that Nvidia with Linux in EFI mode are not the best friends. I learned that I needed to make Kubuntu boot in BIOS compatibility mode, basically by switching grub-efi for grub-pc. No easy task getting rid of the linux-efi bootloader though. After no luck with that, I decided to verify my theory and installed Kubuntu 11.04 from CD, which installs grub-pc and it turned out that this was indeed the issue.

So I fired up my OS X install, where the 12.10 iso was, navigated to the file, right clicked on it and it offered "Burn" menu entry. Cool, I thought and searched my entire DVD collection for an empty DVD. Found one, inserted it in, burnt, rebooted, nothing happened, DVD not detected. Desperation was doubled by now. Booted back OS X, opened the DVD and, well, when OS X says "Burn", it means "I will put this file on the disk for you", not "Burn the iso". Partially happy, partially angry, I searched for another DVD. Burnt the iso properly, rebooted, installed, activated Nvidia driver, rebooted, cried with happiness.

tl;dr - Binary Nvidia drivers are not working when you install Linux on Mac (possibly on all (U)EFI systems) from USB stick, which installs grub-efi bootloader. You need to go the old-school-last-century-way and install from CD/DVD, which installs grub-pc and boots Linux in BIOS compatibility mode. And install the bootloader to the root device, not the partition, otherwise it won't be seen by Mac's bootloader. I'm not sure if the grub-pc can be installed from the USB stick too, I really don't have any energy (and interest) left to find this out, so your safest bet is the CD/DVD, but if you have any additional info, please share in comments.

So you want to keep the URL of downloaded file eh?

This weekend I was in Brno at Red Hat Developer Conference, attending Fedora's KDE SIG meeting. Besides helping these super-awesome folks getting KDE Telepathy into Fedora, I had this idea of storing the download URL of a file that you have downloaded, so you can check where you downloaded the file from. KDE Workspace already provides all that is needed to make this work. Yes, of course it's Nepomuk :)

So I pinged Vishesh Handa about this idea and we got down writing the missing bits. The idea was to simply monitor the browser downloads and add the download url to Nepomuk once the download is completed. I had no prior experience with browser plugins/extensions, but initial research showed that the best way would be to write a NPAPI plugin, which is supposed to run in all browsers, that would mean one code to maintain. However that proved rather difficult (please let me know if you have experience with this and if you think it would be better way to write) so I went the way of less resistance and I wrote Firefox extension, which is based on Plasma-notify extension. While in the process, I made the Plasma-notify work with latest Firefox too ;) Edit: This is apparently not needed anymore, in "about:config", you can set "browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete" to true. Thank 'theghost' for the tip.

Anyway I finished the extension while Vishesh wrote the Nepomuk part in the meantime. We decided to do this in two parts, so that the Nepomuk utility can be reused by anyone/anything else. The extension just calls the binary utility, which takes file and URL as parameters and adds the URL as ndo:copiedFrom into Nepomuk. You can then view the download URL in Dolphin's sidebar.

 

 

Without any more prolongs - here is Firemuk -- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6761102/firemuk.xpi

Keep in mind it's version 0.1 ;) There seems to be problems with regular downloads sometime, I have no idea why. At least not yet. I plan to publish it on addons.mozilla.org once it's more tested. And for you Chrome/Chromium users - yes, I will write the extension for you too. Just hold on :) And as for Konq/Rekonq - it should be super-easy to implement this in these browsers (if the devs could contact me or Vishesh, we'd be more than happy to help). I can see this also working in KGet. KGet already does exactly this. Awesome.

Go ahead and test it and let me know how does it work for you :)

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part V - Gwenview

After few super-busy weeks I finally have time to sit down and write another part of this blogseries. In this installment I'll introduce Gwenview - the default KDE Application for viewing images.

With this great application you can open pretty much any image format you can find, including Photoshop, GIMP, PCX, EPS and much more (I don't have to mention JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, TIFFs..right?). Thanks to Phonon integration, Gwenview can even play videos for you. Just imagine browsing pictures from your camera's memory card, where you have both pics and videos - why open other application for videos? Gwenview does it for you. If you don't like Gwenview showing you videos, there's an option to disable it.

Just recently Gwenview gained some nice OpenGL effects like crossfading when changing image or some subtle animations when selecting files. This will be available in the upcoming KDE Workspaces and Applications release, 4.8. I've been using it ever since and it's working great, but nothing is perfect and if you encounter any bugs or problems with this new feature, I'd like to encourage you to report it at http://bugs.kde.org.

Start page

When you open Gwenview from the applications menu, the first screen that greets you contains list of recently opened folders (in Gwenview), sorted by the last open date, and also the famous 'Places' sidebar, containing the exact same entries as the one in Dolphin (or open/save dialog) for easy navigation. Gwenview can also open and show images from remote URLs (remember KIO?) and you can display the URLs you visited in the 'Recent URLs' tab. The 'Places' sidebar has also a second tab - 'Tags', where you can display content sorted by semantic tags.

Browse mode

Once you select anything from this 'Start page', Gwenview switches to the 'Browse mode'. Here you can simply browse the selected folder, navigate to others using the same breadcrumbs as in Dolphin or by using a 'Places tree' sidebar. When you hover over any image in the 'Browse mode', a small set of buttons appears above the image - these enable you to add that particular image into selection, show it in fullscreen or rotate it left or right. The statusbar of 'Browse mode' contains a filtering menu, shows how many images you have in the current folder and a zoom slider, which controls the thumbnails size in the view.

As mentioned above, 'Browse mode' features advanced filtering - you can use name filter, date filter, tag filter or rating filter or combinations of all. With name filter you have two options - set what the image name should contain or the opposite; filter images with the searched word not in their name. Date filter is also clear - display images with date lesser than, equal to, or greater than the date you select from calender widget. Rating filter - just what you'd expect - less than, equal to, more than the rating you select. Tags - same as names - you can select "tagged with a tag" or "not tagged with a tag". For filtering by more tags, simply add more filters. You can very easily remove any filter you want - just click the little close button next to it and it's gone.

Sidebar

Gwenview houses one hideable sidebar with three tabs. The first one is the 'Places tree' (captioned 'Folders' on the tab) and it is used solely for navigation purposes.

The second tab is 'Information' sidebar and it serves for displaying various informations about the selected image. It has two parts - meta information and semantic information. Meta info comes from exif tags (but also IPTC and XMP, which are both extension of exif) and you can configure which exif data to show - for example exposure time, lens model, if flash was used, used aperture etc. You can also select general file information like file name, file size, time of creation or image resolution. The semantic part lets you enter semantic info - rate the image, set tags and add a comment. You don't have to save it anywhere, it is processed immediately without the need to explicitely save these data.

The last tab - 'Operations' - lets you do basic operations with image or file. The difference being image data and the file in filesystem itself. You can mirror, flip or resize images when in 'Browse mode', but once you switch to 'View mode', two more operations are added - crop and red eye reduction (these would be obviously impossible to do in 'Browse mode'). As for file operations - you can find the usual like rename, move to trash, remove completely (bypass trash), copy to, move to, link to (these last three pops up a 'save file' dialog, so you can select the place and copy/move/link it right away) or open with menu, which contains the system file associations. Lastly this sidebar will let you open a dialog with all file properties like from Dolphin and create new folder.

View mode & Fullscreen mode

The 'View mode' is just what you'd expect - a view mode :) The stausbar filter menu and info is replaced by a zoombar with two additional buttons - 'Fit' and '100%', which either fits the picture to the window or show it in it's original size. If the picture is zoomed more than the window can fit, a small translucent rectangle will appear on the right side showing your current position, which you can change right from there by simply dragging the inner rectangle, the image moves simultaneously. Images can be switched by spacebar to the next and backspace to the previous image. These and others can be configured from the 'Settings' main menu, under the 'Configure Shortcuts...' menu.

Double-clicking the image in the 'View mode' will switch it to fullscreen viewing. If you move mouse to the top screen edge, a small toolbar will slide down. In this toolbar you few buttons like starting a slideshow, switching to the next or previous image, rotating the image (very useful when you're presenting pictures and you find some that needs rotating; no need to exit the fullscreen slideshow, just click the button and keep watching), the wrench button hides the slideshow and the topbar setting - timeout, theme and height of the topbar and one thing I particularly like is the possibility to set random order in the slideshow, you can just load some folder with tons of images, hit fullscreen, check the 'Random' setting and then leave it whole day just nicely fading some great pictures. The other half of the fullscreen topbar is thumbnails strip where you can also make images selection, either by the classic old ctrl+click or by using the image overlay buttons for selection without keyboard.

Very similar thumbnails bar is also present in the 'View mode'. This greatly combines viewing the image and displaying the contents of the current folder. When you make a selection of more than one image, either from the 'Browse view' or the thumbnail bars, all those images in that selection are then displayed in 'View' and 'Fullscreen' modes. However one can't apply operations on this whole selected group, but I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to implement. You can still use batch processing though, see below..

Toolbar, Share & Plugins

The main toolbar has things already covered - buttons to switch between views, buttons to move to the next or the previous image, buttons to rotate the image left or right and then a 'Share' button. Thanks to kipi-plugins, one can export images right from Gwenview directly to 17 services, including email, Facebook, Picasa or the famous Czech rajce.net. As in every KDE application, the toolbar is fully customizable, you can add or remove buttons or change how they are displayed.

Thanks to the kipi-plugins you can do all sorts of things right from Gwenview - import images from several services (Facebook, Picasa or scanner), convert to black & white, print, create a panorama and more. All these can be found in the 'Plugins' main menu (provided you have correctly installed kipi-plugins). If you miss a feature or export/import service, you can very simply add it by writing a kipi-plugin. This plugin would then be used by every app that enables them, like digiKam or KSnapshot.

Among the plugins you will also find set of features for batch processing. These enables you to convert images between formats, do a batch renaming, add border and effects or recompress and resize the images.

The closing...

Gwenview is truly a great application. Just go and explore it (hint: open Help->Gwenview Handbook and see the chapter Tips for some tips). I simply enjoy the times I open it for viewing my images. If you have ideas on how to improve it even more, you can either file a wish on bugs.kde.org or add your idea to KDE Brainstorm at forums.kde.org. And if you think the author, Aurélien Gâteau, deserves a 'Thank you', don't hesitate to express it! Appreciation for good work always makes the people spending their free time on it happy ;)

You can also support KDE development by joining the game (really, this is huge help). Oh and if you'll be at FOSDEM, you can buy the KDE folks a beer :P See you there...

(and before you ask, I use standard Oxygen with slimmed scrollbars and my own color scheme based on one of Bespin's color schemes ;)

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part IV - KIO

This part looks at an advanced and one of the major KDE technology - KIO. If you're a KDE Workspace user, you're using it pretty much every day.

So what is KIO? It is a technology that makes arbitrary resources available in form of files (if it makes sense to be files) which any KDE application can seamlessly access and use. Let's have FTP server as an example. It's a remote server somewhere on the other side of the country. How would you normally access it? Install some FTP client, create new connection, enter your credentials, connect, browse the server in the client, do some work. With KDE KIO all this is not needed.

KIO makes the remote content available like normal (local) folders, which you can access from any KDE application like Dolphin or Gwenview and just work with the files. All the magic like downloading the file locally, uploading the file back once saved etc. is handled automatically in the background and it is happening in separate process, so it does not block GUI while working. But it's not just remote content.

Thanks to KIO's modular architecture it is very easy to create KIO for pretty much anything one might need. By default, KDE ships over 40 different KIO plugins, among which we can find the already mentioned FTP, FISH, NFS, SFTP, Samba, SVN, but also POP3, IMAP, KIO for installed fonts and programs, settings, audio cd, man pages, searching in your semantic data and others. You can check at least some of your KIOs by opening KDE Help Center (fire up kickoff and type "help" in the search field) and looking for "Kioslaves" in Contents list. There you can also find help for using some of them.

Any application can take advantage of KIO. Among KDE applications, Dolphin is probably the most logical one to make use of KIO, so let's take a look at some of KIOs and Dolphin.

Audio CD

Remember the FTP access example above? Think about the same for ripping audio CDs. How would you most probably proceed? Install a ripping software, install codecs, run the software and let it rip the audio CD. Not anymore. That's how it's done on...well, other systems.

When you insert any audio CD into your computer, one of the actions the Device Notifier offers is "Open with File Manager". You ask "why would I do such thing"? Well, just try it ;) You'll see several folders - CDA, FLAC, Full CD, Information, Ogg Vorbis and whole bunch of wav files. If you have the Lame libs installed, you'll see even MP3 folder. You might think that the CD authors are just awesome for giving you all this right on their CD, but no. That's KIO's authors who's awesome.

So you want to have your CD in mp3 quickly? What's easier than dragging the MP3 folder to wherever you want it? It will start converting on the fly. And for bonus points - it will also fill in id3 tags from cddb (if the CD was identified). The same goes with you wanting a FLAC quality music, or the libre format OGG. Just drag the folder and you're done. No need for CD rippers anymore.

Remote files access

Here belongs KIOs for (S)FTP, NFS, Samba, FISH and all remote file access. You want to copy some files from a computer in other room where you have SSH access? No problem, FISH KIO takes care of that. You need files from your Windows machine? Samba KIO got you covered. KIO for FTP was absolute bless when I was doing web development. For quick fixes, I just fired up Dolphin, entered server address, opened up the file (without the need to download it first), fix stuff, save (it gets uploaded back), close Dolphin and I was done. Just perfect.

To access remote server, all you have to do is type the protocol and its IP address to Dolphin's address bar and hit Enter. In case it needs authorization, you'll be asked for your credentials. After that you can browse and open the remote files just like those on your hard drive, right inside Dolphin. You can even use the breadcrumb navigation to navigate. Of course you can copy & paste files to these remote locations.

Archvies

We've all been there. You download an archive, navigate to your Downloads folder and you want to browse that archive, not opening special application for that, because that's just an unwanted delay for you. That's how great archive KIOs are. They enable you to browse the archives with ease. By default KDE ships KIOs for ZIP (bzip, bzip2, gzip..) and TAR, which covers the most used archives in Unix world. You can open files straight from the archives, you can copy them out, but you can't paste files in. I confess that my archives knowledge is only that limited and I don't know why you can't do that.

Applications, Fonts, Settings and friends

These are great examples of the reusability of KIOs throughout the system. If you put "applications:/" or "settings:/" in your Dolphin's address bar, I'm pretty sure that you'll recognize these things. Yep, it's the same you see in Kickoff menu and in System Settings. This is a great example of technology reuse and applying different visualisations on the same data set.

From these KIOs you can either run the application or the System Settings config module. Fonts ("fonts:/") displays all your Personal or System fonts, which allows you to easily copy them and share or add new ones. Other similar KIOs are "desktop:/", which shows your desktop contents, "trash:/", which shows your trashed files, or "floppy:/", which lets you access your floppy disk (oh the nostalgia..). Also Konqueror and Rekonq are using KIO for http protocol. So basically you're viewing pages through KIO as well.

Timeline

Very interesting and little known KIO is Timeline. This is a KIO based on Nepomuk and it contains all your edited files. Currently there's no "easy" access (depends on how you define easy) and as far as I know the only way to access it right now is by entering "timeline:/" into Dolphin address bar. Hopefully someone will make a great use of this KIO soon.

So what great features does Timeline bring to the table? Instead of trying to remember what file it was that you edited on Wednesday, you can simply browse the Timeline to get all files edited on Wednesday. Yep. Simple as that :) It simply lists all created or edited files separated by days. It is not /that/ useful when you need broader search parameters, but it illustrates nicely the power of KIO connected with KDE's semantic capabilities. For this to work you have to have the Semantic desktop search enabled (aka Nepomuk).

Man pages

Advanced users quite often use "man" in terminal for displaying Unix manual pages. For that we also have a KIO. You can get quick access to man pages by launching KRunner (Alt+F2 by default) and typing what manpage you want - "man:/find". If you want some particular section, you can add it in parenthesis - "man:/find(3)". Or you can also just display index of that section - "man:/(3)".

This should give you some overview what is KIO all about. As I repeated few times in the article, any KDE application can take advantage of KIO. For example the Folder view widget on desktop can display KIO content. The open/save file dialog can browse KIOs. Also DigiKam internally uses several KIOs for working with albums. These however can't be easily used in Dolphin as they have quite complex syntax, but it would be really cool if your DigiKam albums were simply reusable elsewhere.

There are more KIOs. You can find some on the interwebs (though possibly outdated), like a KIO for browsing Flickr or a "TV KIO", both done by David Edmundson. And it's very easy to write your own shiny KIO. If you have ideas and time, there's nothing easier than jumping to #kde-devel at freenode and asking for help. I'm sure someone will point you to the right direction.

If you're using a KIO which wasn't mentioned above and you think it should deserve a mention (my day has only 24 hours ;), you can share it in comments. I may add it to the article later as well.

At the end I'd like to revive one older and a bit related post of my friend Alex Fiestas about Smart Folders (as it is called in OS X). Basically it is about having folders where you have a related content. It can do more, just sit down and have a play with it ;) Check out the video in his blog, it's definitely worth it! As an update to that - the UI for what Alex is describing still wasn't done yet :/ So if you'd like to improve KDE Software, this could be your great starting point!

And as usual - if you like the KDE Software, please consider support by joining the game (you'll get a gift! ;).

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part III - KSnapshot

In today's part we'll have a look at an application, that I've (again) grown so used to, that I consider it part of the Workspace itself - KSnapshot.

I remember doing screenshots on my old Win XP machine - press the print screen key, open up MS Paint, paste the image there and save. That's so last-century. I don't know how it works these days in Win7, but feel free to let me know below in the comments. OS X went one step further - after you press some magic key combo (which I could never remember), the image is saved on your desktop. But the fearless KDE developers went even further. 

After you press the print screen key, the KSnapshot pops up with little window and your screenshot in it. From here you can either save the image to a format and place of your own liking (clever automatic file numbering included). However if you don't like the screenshot you just took, you can easily trigger a new one, even with different options, without the file being saved (which is useful for not wasting space and for saving some time from the need to delete the incorrect screenshots). Automated/batch saving of screenshots could be handy, though I've never had a need for it yet.

The main KSnapshot window allows you to select what screenshot you actually want to take. "Full Screen" obviously captures the full screen. "Window under cursor" will create a screenshot of only the window you are pointing at. This is awesome with enabled KWin compositing as it will capture the window's shadows on transparent background (provided you save it as png; that's for example how the screenshot above was made). "Rectangular region" and "Freehand region" lets you manually select the area you want captured. The last mode is "Section of window", which captures only the selected portion of window, highlighted on mouse over. This way you can take clean screenshot of just a toolbar, just the inner view of the window or some other part.

Great feature is the possibility to set a timer for the capture. So let's say you want to take a screenshot of something, that you need to prepare first, like opening a menu (which would get closed by running KSnapshot). So you set the timer to 10 seconds, press the big "Take a New Screenshot" button and then simply do your thing while watching the countdown on top of the screen. KSnapshot window itself hides during this countdown so it does not get in the way and reappears after the timeout, with the new screenshot.

Once you have the screenshot ready, you can either open it directly in system associated application for images, copy it to the clipboard or export it to a supported service (through kipi-plugins), which includes Facebook, Picasa, popular Czech site rajce.net, Flickr and tens others. Of course you can email the image or print it as well.

Saving image is pretty straight forward, so I'll rather show you a great example of quick screenshots sharing with your friends. First of all you need the "Pastebin" plasmoid (don't confuse it with "Paste" plasmoid which has the same icon, but does a different thing). Add it to some panel and configure if needed (default imagebin is wstav, but you can choose from several image sharing services - wstav.org, imgur, Simplest Image Hosting and img.susepaste.org; if you have some c++ skills, you can easily create your own backend). Once it sits in your panel, you can share you screenshots just by dragging them from the KSnapshot window directly and dropping it onto teh plasmoid. After few seconds you have a link to your uploaded image ready for pasting in your clipboard, so all you have to do is press ctrl+v and you're done. Simple, fast and powerful.

You can also drag&drop the image to anything that accepts image drops, for example your opened image editor, document you're writing or also Plasma Desktop, in which case it will offer you to create a Picture frame (this works for any images dropped on desktop, not just those from KSnapshot).

So that's how we work with screenshots in KDE Workspace (note, that all that is mentioned here, is the standard part of KDE SC, you don't have to install anything additional for this to work). If you have ideas for KSnapshot or if you'd like to share how you use KSnapshot to make your work easier, be sure to leave a comment.

Before I close this part, I'd like to invite you all to Plasma Bug Days, which will be held this Friday and Saturday (December 2nd and 3rd), more info on Aaron's blog. Come give us a hand if you want the 4.8 release to really rock!

You can also always support KDE by Joining the game!

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part I - Dolphin

For the first part of this blogseries I picked Dolphin. A basic application, that lets you do file management. Dolphin is very powerful application, so let's have a look at what all you can do with it.

The panels

Dolphin has four main areas. The panel on the left is your bookmarks/favorite/quickaccess places. Adding your own places is as easy as it can get - simply drag a folder and drop it there. Another way is to create it manually via panel's context menu, where you can even set your own label and icon, that's the 'My narcistic pictures' item for example. Reordering items to your own likening is again just a matter of drag and drop. You can also drag any folder/file to the places in that sidebar and it will be copied to that place. When you have some removable media, they are automatically displayed there as well and you can disconnect/eject them from the very same panel (as well as from other places).

If the drives are mounted, simple mouse hovering over the drive will show you its free space in a little bar, so you can have at least rough idea how much more data you can put on it. This places panel will stay the same throughout the whole KDE Workspace, in every open/save dialog you will have your places right there.

 

On the right side there's a Preview panel. But it's not just an image preview panel, it can show you much more. Selecting a mp3 will for example show you its ID3 tags, rating from Bangarang media player etc. But that's not where the fearless KDE developers stopped - you can also 'preview' the song right from the panel. That is, listen to it without opening any media player. Same goes with videos, it shows various info like dimensions, used codec and you can preview them right in the panel without the need to do pretty much anything but one click. When there's no preview available for certain file types, it will show nice shiny icon, courtesy of the Oxygen team. You can set what do you want to have preview of and also a size limit of the files. That's very useful when you don't want your resources to be busy on generating a preview of a very large image for example. 

Some informations in this Preview panel appears as links. Yep, that's right - you can click it and get list of files with the same parameter. So for example you can list all photos taken by some particular camera, list all photos with some particular ISO setting, focal length, you can list all your songs by a particular author, by its codec, by its tags, you can list arbitrary images by particular resolution and so on and so on, you get the idea. This is all done thanks to Semantic Desktop implementation (which is currently the best out there), known as Nepomuk in KDE community. But more about this in some later post.

Dolphin has other panels for powerusers, they are hidden by default. There's a Terminal panel for when you need to quickly do some command-line work right at your fingertips (press F4), then we have a Folders panel, which is the classic tree-view of your folder structure and lastly there's a Search panel for doing semantic search. The position and size of the panels is fully configurable, so your Dolphin can look like this for example:

 

Dolphin's statusbar displays various useful informations. The leftmost text tells you how many folders and files you have in the current folder and how much space they take. Further to the right there's a slider which lets you control the size of icons in the main view. This is especially cool for when you're using Preview mode (more on that later). And then the right side features the most useful thing of the statusbar in my humble opinion - the remaining free space on the device you're currently browsing. Navigate to your flash drive and you'll immediately see how much space you have left on it.

The statusbar is also place for displaying error messages, which you can very easily copy by right clicking on them and selecting "Copy message".

 The main view

And now let's take a look on what makes Dolphin so great in file management - the main view itself. The default is just what you'd expect - sorted folders and files, browsing folders and opening files is nothing special. But clicking with right mouse button on folder/file reveals some interesting features. Let's skip the obvious things like opening folder in new window or tab or adding it to places. Right from the menu you can compress whatever files/folders you have selected and you can choose either zip, rar, or tar.gz. Of course you can open the full blown dialog which lets you select different compression formats and options, where to place the archive and so on.

 

Dolphin also allows one to copy or move file to a desired location right from the context menu. This is very nice when you need to quickly copy/move something to your home folder or few levels deep (untill the menu fills your whole screen). It also features several last used locations, so it becomes way quicker after first time.

 

But for moving files around Dolphin has something better. With the "Split" button in the main toolbar you can split the main view and have {midnight|total|norton}-commander-like interface. The side that is not currently active (you are not working in) is slightly greyed out so you can tell by quick look which side you're currently controlling. There's another quite useful feature regarding file management - you can select files with the ordinary key shortcuts (holding ctrl or shift), but you can also select multiple files using just your mouse - every folder/file will show you a little plus icon in the top left corner after you move your mouse over it. Once you made your selection of files, just grab them and move, folders will automatically open if you hold your files over them (might need enabling in settings) and once you drop them, a little menu pops up letting you select the appropriate action - Copy, Move, Link or Cancel the whole action. Holding down a key while you drop your files might prevent this menu from popping up, so hold Ctrl for copy, Shift for move and Ctrl+Shift to automatically create a link upon dropping.

Besides splitting the main view, Dolphin can also have tabs, just like your browser. Simply press Ctrl+T or click on some folder with mouse wheel and there you have a new tab, right inside Dolphin.

Another great Dolphin feature is filtering. Imagine you're in a folder with thousands of files and you want to quickly filter certain files by filename. For this Dolphin has a special Filter bar, which you can turn on from the main menu or by pressing Ctrl+I. Then just type into the filter bar and files are immediately filtered as you type. Of course Dolphin includes also full searching by filename or content.

Navigation 

Navigation in Dolphin is very easy and intuitive. On top of the main view there's a Location bar, which displays breadcrumb navigation. You can not only click the folder in the breadcrumb navigation, but you can also click the little arrows after each folder and that gives you quick access to subfolders of that particular folder, so you can quickly navigate to some other folder without even having to go back in you history. You can also very easily switch the Location bar into edit line by clicking on the empty space after the breadcrumb navigation, and type your own location with autocompletition, press Enter and you're there. This is especially great for accessing hidden folders on your filesystem, which on Linux have "." before their name, so for example your workspace config folder is ".kde4".

You can also navigate by using the arrow buttons in toolbar. Like in almost every KDE Application, you can very easily configure the toolbar yourself (both its position and its buttons). So you can for example add button for going one directory up or to go directly to your Home folder. All is very easy to do and very intuitive. Your Dolphin can look like this for example:

View modes

Dolphin has several view modes. The Icons view you've already seen in the previous screenshots. Another one is Details view, which shows list of files and their details next to them. Third view is Columns view. This will be very well known for OS X users - every folder openes new column. You might say that what's the point of having more than 2 columns when you won't be able to see the first one anyway. This works very similar to the breadcrumb Location bar, except it's more extended. You can move in the columns "history" with a scrollbar and see all the folders' contents at hand. Obviously you can also copy/move files between these columns.

In every view you can still select folders/files with the little plus icon which appears when you hover your mouse above the item. And in addition, you can switch on Preview mode in all three mentioned view types. Preview will simply show you preview of your files (text files, html, images etc). And by using the slider in the statusbar, you can make them larger or smaller. This setting will stay for the Preview mode, so when you exit the Preview mode, you'll have the original icon size setting (which you can change in the very same way). Also every folder (reliably) remembers it's view mode, used throughout the system. Isn't it cool?

Plugins

Dolphin is extendable by plugins. So for example you can have SVN or Git intergration right in Dolphin. This enables you to pull newest version from remote server or to push your changes to the server. Files also uses emblems to visualize changes in files. So if you have some uncommitted changes, you'll see little green arrow over the file and it's name will be in green.

You can also extend Dolphin's functionality with your own actions (not too hard to do, but requires some knowledge). We're using this in KDE-Telepathy where we add an action to the context menu that enables you to send files to your IM contact.

Last words...

So you see, Dolphin is simple yet very powerful and fully customizable file management application with "Simply have it your way" idea. And there's much more. We'll get back to Dolphin in other parts of this series, when we'll take a look at features like KIO or Nepomuk browsing.

In the near future we'll all see Dolphin 2.0, which will be included in the 4.8 release in January. I've been using the development version for quite some time and I must say - this is really something to look forward to! More details are in Peter Penz's blogpost. And we'll probably look at the new view system after the 4.8 release.

And what's your favorite feature in Dolphin? How do you use Dolphin and how it helps you get through everyday's work with KDE Workspace? Share your thoughts below...

Notifications from your Android phone on your KDE desktop

Recently I came across Android Notifier, an open-source application that enables your Android phone to forward any notifications right to your desktop, so you'll never miss a call or sms even if you left your phone in the bathroom. The desktop part is written in Java and thus it's multi-platform and it works pretty well with KDE (trunk). So let's have a closer look at what it does and how to make it work.

The Android part runs as a service and simply listens to any new events in the system. Once this event occures, the phone forwards that event to your computer via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (TCP or UDP) or USB cable, using its own protocol. You can configure which events you want your phone to forward and you can also encrypt them. Simple as that.

The desktop counter-part then sits in systray from where you can control the service and change its settings. It allows you to set the reception method, notification method and notification actions. You can choose from three notification methods - System default, Growl notifications and Libnotify. Libnotify works just fine with Plasma's notification system (and as a bonus you'll get a history of notifications, go buy a beer for Plasma devs). You can set custom actions for a particular event (phone ringing, sms received, battery status etc). Well custom actions is just 'Copy to clipboard' and 'Execute command', but the last one gives you pretty much all the power you need. And lastly, you can have the service handle either all devices sending these notifications or you can limit it to show only some devices. Oh and you can view a log of received events by right-clicking on the tray icon, though that does not work for me.

How-to set up

Let's start with the desktop service. Head over to downloads section and choose package matching your system (there are both 32bit and 64bit rpm, deb, zip and even exe and dmg) and then just install it as any other downloaded package. After you're done, you will find 'Android Notifier Desktop' in your kickoff menu (or whatever you use). If you choose to use Wi-Fi as a notification channel, you must open port 10600 in your firewall. If you're on Kubuntu, you can do that from command line by typing 'sudo ufw allow 10600' and then checking it by 'sudo ufw status'. If you're using other distros, you're on your own, sorry. As for 'Notification display methods', I suggest to use Libnotify on KDE (and possibly Gnome too) as that will get you a better 'integrated feel', but feel free to try the others as well. That's basically all you need to do on the desktop (if you're using Wi-Fi).

On Android you have to install the service from Market. For your comfort here's a QR code you can just scan (use Barcode Scanner or Google Goggles):

After you've downloaded and installed it, open Remote Notifier from your apps launcher. In 'Notification Service' you can choose to start the service after phone boot. Under 'Notification Methods' you can choose which method to use. For Wi-Fi you can set plenty of options, including target IP (default is Global broadcast address), used protocol (TCP or UDP), auto-enabling Wi-Fi on the event or using Mobile network in case Wi-Fi is switched off. I suggest setting a fixed IP to send the notifications to, but of course that's up to you (and your situation, fixed IP may not be always applicable). Once you have your method set, you can choose which 'Events to notify' and also set a 'Security', which features password protected encryption. After your preferences are all set, you can test the notifications using 'Send test notification'. If you see the notification pop-up on your desktop, congratulations, you're all set. If not, head over to the Wiki section of the project, it has some nice howtos and additional informations.

Enjoy :)

Quick update on KDE Telepathy Contact List - now with groups, too!

Just a very quick update on things inside Contact List. One of the major missing features before KDE Telepathy (yes, we still have no cool project name..ideas?) release can be made is groupping support in contact list. I've been working on this for the past few days and I'm proud to announce - Groups are working! Oh yes and that's not all. We support cross-account groups, that means, that the account the contact belongs to really does not matter. Just think groups. You can also have one contact in multiple groups (though there's currently no GUI way how to do that). 

This is not yet in master as it is still bit like a minefield currently, but I'm so excited about this that I had to share :) It's getting really close now. I also hope that after some discussion with Collabora guys I can have this model included in Telepathy-Qt4-Yell project, which host various models (and we are already using the AccountsModel in Cotnact List) which will hopefully one day get merged back into Telepathy-Qt4 master.

As pictures say more than thousand words, behold...

I'll post a longer blogpost about all the new fancy things we're working on after the groups are all finished (this is a priority #1 now). So stay tuned. 

By the way, the historicaly first release of KDE Telepathy is really imminent now ;) 

Is Mac OS X better than KDE? It's different. (aka My first weeks with MacBook Pro)

So my goo'ol' tablet-pc hp tx2500 died. Just like that. Turned out it was rather common issue with that model. Repair for $400 plus shipping to US and back and probably also customs taxes etc. So I decided to go for a new laptop. To make it short - I bought mid-2010 MacBook Pro 13".

First I was excited to finally get my hands on that infamous OS X, where almost everyone takes inspiration from. I could finally use THE Dock, those top-screen-menus and all the fancy stuff that OS X brings. It was cool to play with it. But then the wow-effect weared off and I needed to actually do something (work).

First big deal was installing the applications. Coming from Linux land, I had no idea how it works on Mac. I downloaded LibreOffice for some quick Word writing. Everything, LO included, is a dmg image which is mounted just like any other image in Linux. Then you run the app from it. Then you reboot and the app is gone. It is not installed, the image is not mounted anymore, file associations not working etc. So what the heck? Then I found out, that all you need to do to 'install' the app is to drag the app into Applications on Dock. Easy and elegant. But boy it took time to figure this out (Ironically, I think it was Qt4 install that made me understand). The app itself is kind of a package, it looks like one file, but in fact, it has the whole app data in it (and yes, it is browseable).

Managing running apps is then a whole different story. It's weird. Be it switching apps, minimalising them, maximalising them etc. Window management is just weird on OS X (note: I don't say it is bad! It's just different to what I'm used to). Pressing the app-switch combo (alt-tab equivalent) shows bunch of apps, but switching to them does nothing. The famous Exposé also does not show them. They have a bright spot under them on the Dock (which I hope indicates it is running), but clicking on it again does nothing. So...what the heck? I thought this was system for simple users. Pressing the supposedly Maximize button also behaves rather randomly, but never the way I want to. Mostly it just expands the app to all available vertical space, but horizontal dimension stays the same. I could continue this all day, but you get the idea :)

Now don't get me wrong, the system is nice. It has lots of features I'd love to see in KDE/Linux too. Everything seems sooo seamless. You run a game, it all nicely fades in and fades out. No flickering, no screen blinking, just a smooooth transition. Oh and you should see the transition of video to full-screen ;) Now switching back to linux and playing something with mplayer(2)? Any Plasma notification (composite=on) will completely disrupt the playing video (the colors are all random, then green, then the whole screen blinks and all is ok). Imagine you're adjusting volume/screen brightness while the video is playing fullscreen - everytime you touch that key, you experience this two-sec-flickering. So I'm asking - Can we (at KDE) do something about it?

KDE's native compositing system is overall on par with Mac's. I'd say even better. Nice example is the Exposé effect. On Mac, you get all the windows and you can switch between them. On KDE, you can even close them right from the Exposé (and with Compiz you can just zoom-in the window even without switching to that app) or clicking the desktop takes you to desktop. So, great job KWin team! The only thing I miss in KWin is the ability to trigger it with four-fingers touchpad combo like on OS X.

Which brings us to the (awesome!) multi-touch touchpad. It's used everywhere throughout the OS X. Be it zooming, rotating, switching pages, etc etc. Linux can work with no problem with the multi-touch. Thanks to the kcm_touchpad I can set two fingers scrolling, map two finger tap to right click and three thingers to middle click (this I miss on the OS X), so I can easily open new tabs with three fingers, close them the same way and so on. But the missing thing is the gestures support. For once, there's no framework for that by default. Canonical started the uTouch project, so Ubuntu does support the gestures, but AFAIK the patches weren't picked by upstream. So to get a gestures support, I'd have to patch my kernel, X, and then compile the whole uTouch thing. But let's say this works. Are the KDE apps ready for that? Can I for example zoom in Gwenview/Okular/Konqueror using the pinch-to-zoom gesture? Can I rotate images in Gwenview/DigiKam by rotating two fingers? And if not (which I can't test :), Can we (KDE) do something about it?

 Next thing is basic applications. Applications themselves are again on par on both systems. But generally, I'd say that although you can see some inspiration taken from OS X into KDE, but we made it better everywhere. We went one more mile. Be it the already mentioned Exposé, or KDE's Dolphin versus Mac's Finder. Dolphin offers almost the same UI as Finder, but offers improved features over Finder. One example - the breadcrumb navigation. You can display that in Finder and you can navigate with it by double-click. Ok, nice. Now Dolphin enables you to navigate with single-click (not much an improvement..) AND it let's you select any folder from any item in the whole breadcrumb line (clicking the arrows) AND it let's you manually rewrite the path AND then turn it into breadcrumbs again. And you can find these small, life-easing betterments all over KDE. 

And with that we're getting to the desktop environment itself. With Plasma, you have almost endless possibilities. You can turn the panel into whatever you want however you want. The Mac's panel is...well, just a panel. You can't move it (and if so, I haven't figured it out yet), you can't resize it etc. With Plasma, I can do the panel my way. Mac's systray and it's "applets" are quite limited too (I'm starting getting a feeling, that this is somehow Apple's trademark - do everything limited). For example, you can't set the volume with just mouse-wheeling over the icon. You can't mute the sound by middle-clicking the icon. In fact, you can't mute the sound at all through that control. Bummer. You can configure what time/date things to show, but you won't get a calendar by clicking on it (hey, even windows does that!). So, again, KDE has the same, but little better. On the other hand, in Mac OS X you have all icons in the same style and all monochromatic. With KDE, I currently have bunch of white icons and bunch of color icons. I know this is all in the hands of the apps developers and Plasma can't do anything about it. We can only hope, that someday everyone will ship a mono icons as well :) Oh and how can I miss Klipper? With middle-click-pasting it is the ultimate Linux clipboard tool. Sadly, nothing like that for OS X (at least in basic system).

Both systems seem to be very well integrated as well. Though I miss the KJobs in OS X. Copying files is still with the old-school-dialog. This is great about KDE - all (or most of) the running actions are gathered at one place, so you don't have to look for the small dialogs showing the copy progress, or download progress or whatever. You just click an icon and see them all, you click it again and all of them hides but you can still see the progress on the icon. Just neat :) Also in KDE you can view notifications history, on Mac they just disappear (for example DropBox). But with regards to style - I like the OS X notifications better than our Plasma ones, they feel just too heavy. Nevertheless, Mac deals better with the metadata stuff. We still miss a good Nepomuk integration (or do we?). I can see in the metadata where did I downloaded that file from 14 days ago. Another cool OS X feature is the simple color labeling of files/folders. Here we can only hope and wait for deep Nepomuk integration in KDE (is there some report on the current status somewhere btw? I may be completely wrong about the Nepomuk, so take it with reserve). 

Last thing is hardware. Since OS X is optimized (or at least I suppose they've put big effort into it) right for that particular hardware, it is of course better in OS X, be it battery, keyboard or peripheals like integrated mic. The keyboard itself is not that fun when not in OS X (absence of Home/End, Page keys, Delete/Insert, Print Screen, Pause etc), because OS X does everything with key combos. Which, of course, does not work well in Linux. But I was able to make all the keys working with the Pommed project, also backlight works nicely with the Power-management-plasmoid, keyboard light works as well, camera, graphics acceleration, most of it works out-of-the-box, the rest I was able to make work thanks to Alin (bug him at #kde-telepathy :P). The standard external keyboard works kind of weird in OS X. First of all, it won't let you do any config, like layout etc, it just asks you to press a few keys and that's it. Then, Home/End + Shift works rather disasterously - instead of selecting the whole line, it selects all the text from cursor to beginning/end, which can be dangerous if you don't realize that and you start typing right after pressing Shift+Home (you delete all your text).

So as of today, I have fully working Fedora 14 x86_64 install with KDE in dualboot with Mac OS X (don't ask me how I did that, I'm still not sure :D ). Battery holds little less in Fedora than on OS X, but it's not that bad. The touchpad is a bit sensitive, that might get some messing with the config file as kcm_touchpad does not seem to affect that. Otherwise all works just great.

This post might seem a little against OS X. I won't say it isn't, because I'm coming from totaly neat working KDE to a system, about which you can read/hear only praises. So my expectations were rather high. All in all, I got a bit disappointed.

Mac OS X is better in some areas than KDE and likewise, KDE is better in some other areas. My feeling from OS X is that it is an eyecandy, wheter KDE is for work (but both can do the other thing as well). You can of course disagree and I won't beat you up with it nor try to convince you otherwise. It is just my opinion as a long-time KDE user, who found the best way to work with computer and does not want to change that. I'm glad we have a choice. That everyone can choose what suits him best. For me, it is still KDE :)

PS: Sorry for the need to log in if you want to leave a comment, this is a TypePad limitation (unless you want to give me 9 bucks every month ;). So please, just use your OpenID or Google account or something, the options are pretty extensive :) Thanks!